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I like the idea, but I don’t think it would work. If a government tells you “don’t reveal that you’ve given us data”, the same government – through its police and justice systems, which it controls to some degree – is not going to brook “well, I only revealed it through *inaction*” as a defense.

A dead man’s switch only works when its operation *cannot* be bypassed under duress. You’d need to be able to credibly argue that there was *no plausible way* for you to prevent the switch from activating for there to be a shred of a chance that you’d come away from this without sanction.

I disagree. A ‘Gag Order’ cannot require the recipient to actively pursue secrecy or commit to false information like(which can be construed as fraud when performed by a private entity). It only prevents the recipient from informing the nature/content of the issue under the Gag order (and possibly the existance of). So the defense position is simply, “I can neither confirm nor deny …” It is up to the observer to infer the results of the ‘dead man switch’.

That was a great talk on KQED Forum. I heard recently that it was possible, by “design,” to break encryption. Also, quantum computing is here and that is supposed to be able to rapidly factor large numbers.

While the NSA, etc., may be able to break any single encryption, there’s always some limit as to how many of them they can break at any one time. I’ve heard that the NSA stores anything encrypted, indefinitely. So a lot of encrypted innocuous messages might be stored indefinitely. Presumably, that could eat a lot of storage.

I suspect they would then try to hack that person’s computer, to get the messages before they were encrypted. In Ubuntu 13.04, Ubuntu Linux has asserted a desire to do keystroke logging, with an opt out for specific programs. However, the names of the underlying programs may not be available, and even its default Gnome Desktop Nautilus File Manager goes by the name of “File Manager.”

Also, I recently saw an unnamed update offered for Ubuntu 13.04. There’s no telling what it could have been.

The time intervals for the “Dead Man’s Switch” don’t seem to account for latencies, such as site crashes, etc.

Whereas I might reluctantly submit to NSA surveillance, The thought of allowing business competitors (private contractors?) and thieves to access my computer is intolerable.